What's a carbon-capturing cement-making process worth?
As much as General Electric's entire power plant business, high-profile green investor Vinod Khosla – a big backer of green cement startup Calera - said Tuesday at the AlwaysOn GoingGreen conference in Sausalito.
Of course, that's if you believe that catching carbon dioxide in cement offers "the only viable solution to carbon sequestration," as Khosla said he views the market.
That's a pretty substantial claim, given the billions of dollars now being directed at ways to capture and store carbon from coal-fired power plants and other sources. Granted, no such technologies now exist at commercial scale (see Carbon Capture: Possible Solutions, Part III and Duke Leaves Clean Coal Group).
It's also based on the idea that Calera's technology does in fact capture carbon, a claim that has been disputed (see More Clues in Calera Cement Controversy).
But Khosla is bullish on the technology.
"It allows you to go back to the dirtiest and cheapest coal plants being built in India and China," as well as existing plants, he said. "The climate change impacts can be huge, and the economics of it are such that it could potentially work even without a price on carbon."
In other comments, Khosla reiterated his long-standing views that biofuels offer a better and faster route to cleaning up transportation than do electric and plug-in hybrid vehicles (see Green Light post).
He said the media has overstated his negative view of the potential for battery technology to improve in the short term, and suggested people should read his views as expressed in an August blog he wrote at the website Treehugger.com.
Still, he believes that ultra-low-price cars like India's $2,500 Tata Nano will far outsell more expensive hybrids, and that this requires a solution that provides carbon-neutral liquid fuels.
In that vein, he claimed that "we will almost certainly see biofuels that are cheaper than oil in the next three years." That's something that the biofuel industry hasn't been able to accomplish to date, despite very generous government support (see Feds Propose Controversial Biofuel Mandate, Offer $800M to Boost Production).
